'Salt': Fun, if Not Quite a Meal

Jolie shows more muscle tone than heart; nuclear documentary 'Zero' is a scary number

By

John Anderson

Updated July 30, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET

In the first of the many frenetic/kinetic chase scenes sprinkled through "Salt," CIA agent Evelyn A. Salt—accused of being a long-dormant Russian mole—dashes through the labyrinth of the agency's D.C. offices, desperate to keep its surveillance system from tracking her flight. Having disabled various cameras in various ways, she finally peels off her panties, and drapes them over a lens.

Watch a scene from "Salt," a new action film starring Angelina Jolie. Courtesy Columbia Pictures.

And if Tom Cruise had been cast in the role instead of Angelina Jolie, as originally planned? Chances are the scene would have played a bit differently.

But would the movie? Not really. Based on an original screenplay by Kurt Wimmer, this neo-Cold War thriller is out of the classic good-guy-as-fugitive mold, about a CIA agent who may or may not have been a Russian plant and ends up with the entirety of the U.S. clandestine services breathing down her neck. As she tries to find her husband, and perhaps assassinate the Russian president, she's not quite sure who or what she is. And neither are we. Which is precisely why the whole thing works.

Speakeasy

But we're equally in the dark regarding Ms. Jolie, upon whom this putative tent pole is propped. She may in fact be the perfect action avatar—she often looks like she popped out of a videogame, and her stardom seems to put her at an arm's length from humanity anyway. What is she, exactly? An actress. A megacelebrity. And, apparently, Hollywood's reigning female sex symbol. So where's the sex? For that matter, where's the humor? "Salt" has neither, and it seems to have become SOP for Ms. Jolie's on-screen personae to exist on a plane unsullied by desire, laughs or passion.

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Angelina Jolie as the titular CIA operative in 'Salt.'
Sony Pictures

There's something rollickingly puritanical about a film like "Salt," which is director Phillip Noyce's first feature since the 2006 apartheid drama "Catch a Fire," and around which the word "fun" will be bandied about. It is fun: Watching Ms. Jolie do her own acrobatics, under the direction of her longtime stunt coordinator Simon Crane, is a kick, especially in an era when our knowledge of special effects have so diluted the vicarious thrills of high-wire moviemaking. As Evelyn shoots, swings, and flying back kicks her way through legions of foul male antagonists, there may also be some subliminal/primal enhancement involved in watching a woman, rather than a man, doing what Ms. Jolie does—leaping from speeding truck to speeding truck along a dizzying freeway ramp, or clambering along the 11th-floor ledge of an apartment building, while the heads of CIA agents keep popping out of windows, a la Whack-a-Mole. Most of it defies belief, of course, and Salt's vaulting from a moving train into a clean landing on the 51st Street subway platform is really too much. But as defined by Ms. Jolie, and by Mr. Wimmer, our title character is less superagent than superhero.

She's also an operative with finely honed skills, unlimited daring and, like the movie itself, vague complexities: She has a strange relationship with her colleague Winter (Liev Schreiber). Her CIA superior, Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is overly eager to bring her in, dead or alive. Her little-seen husband Mike (August Diehl) couldn't be more colorless. While she can virtually vanish at will, Salt will indeed rematerialize in a sequel—"Salt" all but sets it up. Mr. Noyce, whose best work has been in small-bore dramas ("The Quiet American," "Rabbit-Proof Fence") can also handle large-caliber studio thrillers ("Patriot Games") and isn't afraid to take inspiration where he finds it: Hitchcock's "Notorious" and "North by Northwest" are his influences here, as are the "Bourne" films directed by Paul Greengrass, with their ADD editing and hallucinatory action. There's a bit of gas-baggery—when the great Polish actor Daniel Olbrychski shows up at the beginning of the film, playing the nefarious Russian Orlov, we get a lengthy tutorial on the Cold War, some blather about Lee Harvey Oswald's doppelgänger having assassinated JFK and a storyline that seems, well, kind of familiar—about Russian agents living quiet lives, waiting for the day when the Motherland will crush the West. As plotlines go, it's a lot more exciting in "Salt" than it's been on CNN.

'Countdown to Zero'

During one of "Salt"'s more hair-raising moments, the president of the United States and his aide enter a complex series of numbers and letters into the computer primed to launch a nuclear attack on Russia. The process is reassuringly complex. But among the many things we learn from the worrisome/exhilarating "Countdown to Zero" is that, up until 1977, those so-called enable codes were all set to a single number—zero. As in 12 zeroes. Such was the response of the Strategic Air Command to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's insistence that there be any codes at all.

SAC may have been taking its cues from Gen. Jack D. Ripper of "Dr. Strangelove." ("War is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought.") As "Countdown" tells it, no one in power has had enough time, training or inclination to make the world anything but an incipient ashtray. The documentary, which opens in New York and Washington Friday and Los Angeles next week, will resonate among its audiences like a gong in a subway tunnel. It's a cautionary tale, torqued up: Opening with footage from various terrorist bombings of recent years—London, Bali, Riyadh, Oklahoma City and, of course, New York—it makes the case that no one really wants to ponder, regarding what each of those events would have become had terrorists owned The Bomb. And then it proceeds to tell us how frighteningly easy, and close at hand, nuclear terrorism is.

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Mikhail Gorbachev in 'Countdown to Zero.'
Magnolia

No, "Countdown" is not escapist cinema, not a happy cartoon like "Despicable Me." It's more "Despicable Them," from the Russian lowlifes who trade highly enriched uranium to buy new cars, to the Pakistani nuke-gangster A.Q. Khan, to the entire Iranian leadership. But as odd as it may sound, it's a remarkably beautiful movie. Integrating all sorts of archival footage—including, John F. Kennedy's 1961 "Sword of Damocles" speech before the U.N., which echoes throughout the film—it has a sense of rhythm, color and humanity that evokes melancholy rather than dread. The nighttime photography, of the world's most luminous cities, awakens our sense of grief—not for what's gone, but for what could be, in the blink of an eye. The editing by Brad Fuller and Brian Johnson is miraculous. On top of it all is composer Peter Golub's score, which few would immediately compare to Bach, except for its mathematical precision, contrapuntal textures and intersecting, interlocking parts, which suggest nothing if not the synchronized mechanics of a clock. Which, by the way, is ticking.

Watch a scene from "Farewell" a French-made Cold War thriller. Courtesy NeoClassics Films.

'Farewell'

It's Cold War Week at the movies: French director Christian Carion's real-life espionage thriller "Farewell" is set at what is arguably the era's turning point: It's 1981, Ronald Reagan is barely in office, and France's François Mitterrand presents him with a list of Soviets who've infiltrated American government and business. Mr. Mitterrand also offers an extraordinary estimate: 40% of the Soviet budget is being spent on defense, most of it on pilfering technology. The Soviet Union can't possibly survive, the White House says. Let's propose a strategic missile-defense initiative and push 'em over the edge.

The source of all this information was a real-life KGB agent, Vladimir Vetrov, code named Farewell, and with the usual adjustments for drama his story gets a respectable retelling in this nervy French production. There are actually three directors in "Farewell": Mr. Carion; Guillaume Canet ("Tell No One") who plays Pierre, the charmless engineer and reluctant courier of top-secret information, and Emir Kusturica ("Underground"), who plays Grigoriev, aka Farewell, a world-weary, Francophile KGB colonel with a taste for cognac and a long view of history: The end is near, he knows; let's bring it nearer. Mr. Kusturica, whose own best directing days may be behind him, nevertheless gives a terrific portrayal of a man living inside his head and his history, who listens to Pierre's whining ("I don't want to mess up my life for the state…") with the perfect balance of pity and contempt—and the knowledge that, when it's all over, he'll have even fewer days left than the USSR.

Watch a scene from "Valhalla Rising." Courtesy IFC Films.

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Mads Mikkelsen as One-Eye in 'Valhalla Rising.'
IFC Films

'Valhalla Rising'

Heathens never get enough screen time, but leave it to Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn to set things straight: Reuniting with his longtime collaborator, the increasingly visible actor Mads Mikkelsen ("Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky"), Mr. Refn constructs the stark, violent, filth-ridden world of "Valhalla Rising," and a pre-Christian Denmark. There, the crypto-gladiator One-Eye (Mikkelsen)—led from place to place by a collar on a pole—dispatches all comers with excruciating efficiency. Sold to a group of Christians heading to the New World, One-Eye becomes either the wrath of God or the lethal rebuttal to their nascent religion.

As we've seen in Mr. Refn's ultraviolent "Pusher" trilogy, in "Bleeder," and in the underappreciated "Bronson," the director aims to get under one's skin, but "Valhalla Rising" is far from pure provocation. It's a trip into a primordial world and primeval sensibilities, and if you're looking to shake off the mall-movie blahs, there are few better places to look.

—John Anderson contributes film criticism and coverage to a variety of publications. Joe Morgenstern is on vacation.

DVD FOCUS

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'Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb' (1964)

Stanley Kubrick's quintessential Cold War comedy is also one of the savvier movies, period, about politics in the postnuclear era. Starring Sterling Hayden as the mad general Jack D. Ripper—who decides it's time to end the world—the film also features a brilliant turn by George C. Scott as the quasiclueless General Buck Turgidson, and a much-celebrated triple play by Peter Sellers (as Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake, U.S. President Merkin Muffley and the Kissinger-inspired Dr. Strangelove himself). And, of course, one shouldn't forget Slim Pickens's Maj. "King" Kong, who rides that H bomb into oblivion, and immortality.

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'Seven Days in May' (1964)

Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas had starred together a few years earlier in "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" but they get into a different kind of shootout in this paranoia-fueled thriller from John Frankenheimer. Mr. Lancaster plays the popular cold warrior and chairman of the Joint Chiefs; Frederic March is the unpopular president pushing nuclear disarmament, and Mr. Douglas is the military aide torn between loyalty to man and loyalty to country, as he tries to prevent a coup. According to Mr. Frankenheimer, Mr. Lancaster's character, Scott, was inspired by two other generals, Curtis LeMay and Douglas MacArthur.

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'Thirteen Days' (2000)

Roger Donaldson's thriller about the Cuban Missile Crisis features a wonderfully nuanced performance by Bruce Greenwood as President John F. Kennedy, who (for those who don't remember) had to stare down the Soviets over the placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962. Whether or not it works as history, it certainly works as drama, and includes a very credible performance by Kevin Costner as White House aide Kenny O'Donnell, through whom the story is told. Steven Culp is Robert F. Kennedy, Dylan Baker is Robert McNamara, Len Cariou plays Dean Acheson and Kevin Conway is Gen. Curtis LeMay.

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